A Woman with Several Lives

Author of over fifteen collections of poetry and seven volumes of fiction, Jean Daive has been an important voice in French letters for over 35 years. His first publication, Décimale blanche, which came out in 1967, received much attention; his subsequent volumes have often been serial-Narration d'équilibre, Trilogie du temps, La Condition d'infini each explore a specific concept and/or formal question across three or more volumes. His work has received extensive critical attention both in full-length volumes and numerous articles. Also a translator, he has published translations of Celan and Creeley, among others. Daive has also exerted a considerable influence through his decades of work in radio as a producer at France Culture, as president of the Centre international de Poésie à Marseille (le CiPM), and as the founder and editor of three successive poetry journals, Fragment, which began in 1969, fig., in 1989, and Fin, in 1999. He lives and works in Paris.

Norma Cole, born and raised in Canada, has been involved with contemporary French poetry since the late 1960s. In addition to volumes of poetry by Anne Portugal, Danielle Collobert, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, and Emmanuel Hocquard, she has translated a volume of critical work, Crosscut Universe (Burning Deck, 2000) and a book of interviews with Jean Daive. A student at New College of California in the 1980s and a close associate of Robert Duncan's, Cole has published over ten volumes of poetry, including a selected, Where Shadows Will (City Lights, 2009). Cole has also worked extensively as a visual artist, which has informed her several cross-media projects, from a CD-rom, SCOUT, (Krupskaya, 2004) to her much-vaunted four-month installation Collective Memory, which took the rich history of poetry and visual arts in the San Francisco Bay Area as its launching point (California Historical Society, 2004-2005). A collection of essays and talks, To Be At Music, was published by Omnidawn in 2010. She lives and works in San Francisco.